Spain passed a new intellectual property law requiring every Spanish publication to charge Google News and other services for displaying news snippets from their publications, whether these services want to or not. Google does not agree with the new law and reasoned out that it is not sustainable.
Dubbed as 'Google tax,' the law states that aggregator services such as Google should pay a fee to the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies, the representative organization to the Spanish newspaper industry, when these services post links and excerpts of news articles. Failure to comply would result to paying fines of up to €600,000 ($750,000). The new law will take effect in January 2015.
As a response, Google decided to shut down Google News beginning on Dec. 16.
"As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable. So it's with real sadness that on 16 December (before the new law comes into effect in January) we'll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain," said Richard Gingras, Head of Google News in a blog post.
Some reports say that other similar sites such as Yahoo News will also be affected by the new Spanish law.
Google's decision to shut down Google News in Spain not only means that the news in Spain would no longer be available but also Spanish news publisher content would not be seen in any other Google News edition which include other Spanish speaking countries. However, there are some of the larger publishers which have subsidiaries in South America and Latin America wherein their local content would be maintained in other News sites of Google.
The four-year old Google News is currently available in over 70 international editions and cover 35 languages. Apart from the fact that it charges no amount of money, Google touts the service as having almost everything from the largest newspapers of the world to small, budding local news companies and blog sites.
"Publishers can choose whether or not they want their articles to appear in Google News - and the vast majority choose to be included for very good reason," said Google.
The new Spanish law is aimed at protecting copyright owners in a digital environment. It also gives an inalienable right for publishers to accept compensation from aggregate services for using fragments of content in the news and in other contexts.
